Twitter was down: sporadic outages persist Thursday morning

Twitter appeared to be experiencing a widespread outage on Thursday morning, users discovered, taking their complaints to other sites around the web while waiting for the company to respond.

“Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” said Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman, in response to a request for comment on the outage. The company posted a brief message to the same effect on the Twitter Status blog.

The outage, which began around 9 a.m. PT, appears to be affecting both twitter.com as well as the various clients that users employ to get their Twitter streams. Twitter has dealt with outages in the past, and has worked to correct them with its engineering teams.

Reports recently stated that Twitter expected to reach $1 billion in sales by 2014, significantly outpacing analyst predictions and demonstrating the company’s advertising viability. Today’s outage comes the same day the company introduced plans for new advertising in Europe and Latin America, according to Bloomberg.

10:10 a.m.: Twitter is still experiencing outages, with no further updates from the company on its Status blog.

On Tuesday, Twitter co-founder and executive chairman Jack Dorsey was named the 2012 Media Person of the Year at the Cannes. Previous winners include Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook; and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation. Dorsey was honored at a ceremony for winners on Wednesday evening.

The company featured outages in 2008 and 2009 in issues related to its database structure, but continued to grow despite user frustration.

10:12 a.m.: The service appears to be coming back for both website users and users of Twitter clients. The company still hasn’t updated its Status blog, however.

The site Down Right Now continues to monitor Twitter’s outage, as it appears to be functioning again.

Twitter’s service availability over the past 24 hours, as tracked by downrightnow.com

10:39 a.m.: Penner confirmed that Twitter’s services were returning to normal, but the company wasn’t ready to share any information on what happened.

11:04 a.m.: Well, not so fast? Twitter appeared to go down again around 11am, and after updating the Status blog with an all-clear message around 10:50 a.m., that post once again indicates an outage. It appears this was just a hiccup, however, as the tweets once again began to flow several minutes after the second outage, although Twitter still hasn’t commented on the issues.

11:48 a.m.: Well, the hiccup is back and persisting. Twitter appears to be going up and down, affecting clients like HootSuite that allow publishers and users to manage their Tweets on a dashboard.

12:34 p.m.: Twitter announced via its communcations feed that the outage has been caused by a “cascaded bug” in one of its infrastructure components:

Today’s outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We’ll provide updated information soon.

So, I tried this before but got rejected at the wordpress log in. The short version:
Down in England. And a strange message from a “Follower”, in my inbox, just before the outage, that I had defriended them, even though this certainly was not the case. Maybe a coincidence? Maybe it has something to do with the outage?

I am unable to access twitter in England. I have also received a strange tweet in my email from one of my “friends” who thinks I have un-followed them. Wondering if maybe there is some general foul play at work here, as I haven’t defriended anyone in the last week. Maybe somebody hacked my account, but maybe it’s also having to do with the outage in general. all the best!

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I agree with Taylor. Bad timing for an ad. And wrong place. Of course you could make the argument: any press is good press. So with that mates, I leave with the best IT Solution company ever. Able to take defend against a full scale internet outage, due to fully redundant internet backups of the internet.